Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/28/smoke-filled-rooms.html
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1 Like
DNC doesn’t get it. They want to run things, business as normal when the state of the nation is anything but normal. We need someone like Howard Dean and his fifty state strategy. Get people involved at the grass roots level and excited for 2018 and beyond. DNC is part of the problem, not the answer.
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It’s absolutely infuriating that they’re being so stubborn about this. It’s obvious that there’s a power struggle going on in the DNC right now - the “HillaryCrats” (Republicans-lite) versus the “BernieCrats” (what the Democratic party, by and large, should be).
The HillaryCrats are trying to stonewall the BernieCrats and keep them out of operational power for as long as possible, at least through 2020, but like in 2016, they’re suffering badly for this because far more (D) voters than normal are aware of the dirty party politics and are pushing back hard.
It’s profoundly disgusting to me that we actually stand a chance of losing a lot of seats we might otherwise have won because the party is currently in-fighting so hard over who gets to be the power-brokers. And TBH, I suspect very strongly that Hillary Clinton is behind some of this, because why wouldn’t she be? She lost her shot(s) at the Presidency, so the obvious second-best is becoming the DNC kingmaker, but I think we all learned a big lesson in 2016 how good she is at playing politics (terrible, for those of you paying attention).
Looking forward to a lot of “But muh very qualified wumman” posts. No. No she was not. She wrangled a couple high-ranking positions with no significant prior experience on her hubby’s name recognition and pretended like that was the capstone of a long political career, instead of a whitewash over a long bunch of nothing after her own political career failed before she married Bill (because she failed the DC bar exam and didn’t apparently feel like putting the work in to try again).
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Personally I think this is a good thing since the DNC would rather listen to consultants (techbros of the political world) rather than to their base in the state parties. It seems they want to treat the state parties as piggy banks that give them all their money so they can pick which elections gets funded for their preferred candidates. So seeing candidates getting the funds directly whether they’re ideal for the race they’re in or not is better I think.
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The one thing that the DNC establishment cares about is money. Perhaps starving them of it will be the move that finally wakes them up in 2020. In the meantime, we need to focus support locally on progressive House and Senate candidates in 2018. The DNC’s incompetent influence in those races can be reduced if organisations like Our Revolution step in to supplant the DNC in terms of national organisation support during the midterms (not so difficult, since the DNC doesn’t prioritise them anyhow).
So the progressive wing should stop focusing on the 2016 disaster, stop fighting the DNC establishment, and instead use the opportunity of this election to build its own organisations and prove the current DNC leadership to be what they are: increasingly irrelevant to any Dem voters except affluent Boomers.
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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
There probably is money (or its equivalent) flowing into the DNC, just not into the party coffers.
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Consultants for which they pay exorbitant consulting fees. Circle of life!
[Insert Dogbert comic strip here]
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I think it’s more like the consultants versus the actual party members themselves (I’d go as far as putting Tom Perez in the latter category if he was willing to eject the political consultants entirely). The consultants have so far infected the national party so much that it’s hard to see it exist without them. It’s like the DNC got hit with the six sigma idiot stick.
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Hah, I was thinking that. It’s just sad seeing technocrats take over so much of politics that any level of sincerity be it left or right wing is seen as dangerous (well right wing for sure but I’m biased obviously).
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Well… Remember that Hillary had hiring control / veto power in the DNC from some time in 2015. Right now the vast majority of the “infection” is 1000% because of her picks, and it looks like she put a bunch of loyal morons in over people that can win races.
The pushback from BernieCrat-leaning people like myself is because the party is clearly suffering badly from this infection, and we need to root it out quickly.
I can sort of get behind doing this just for the 2018 elections, but there needs to be some compromise from the party as well, not just the “STFU and fall in line or we’ll blame the voters AGAIN!!!” like they did in 2016.
Bending over and taking it just to have “your nominal party” win is a Republican trait, not a Democrat one. Don’t try any harder than Hillary did to make both parties corporatist, exploitative BS factories, please.
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Definitely. 2018 is an opportunity. The DNC establishment is effectively useless during midterms anyhow, so the progressive wing should do their own thing, prove that they can raise money and organise phone banks and commission polls just as well if not better than the DNC. If they do that and get candidates elected next November, they can be the ones to demand real compromise before 2020.
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I’m saving my donations for Green candidates - unless I see the Democrats run a candidate like Sanders only 20+ years younger. And I mean actually run such a person, not just have them as a token inclusion in the primaries.
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Yeah, I think we pretty much agree here; it’s really the fact that an obstructionist DNC is just a time bomb and that’s got me really worried, as we need strong party unity for 2020 and 2022 (where there’ll probably be a panicked pushback from the RNC where they pull out all the stops to try and recapture some power), but that time bomb would be going off right about then.
My prediction is that there will be a blue wave in 2018 and 2020, but that we’ll have a divided House and Senate because the DNC is going to push enough HillaryCrats into office that meaningful reform will be effectively stymied, and that will lead to serious voter apathy in 2022 because all that energy will be wasted on candidates that don’t want to roll back a lot of the horrifying legislation we’re seeing (and a bunch that we haven’t seen yet).
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In this case, probably the blue wire.
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Yeah, if the DNC is as bad as it sounds then there’s something appealing about the idea of them being brought down by the free market.
Though, ideally, you’d have people donating their time and money to a party as well as to individual candidates. As well as electing your Sanderses and Obamas and Warrens, you also need to elect a bunch of less-stellar candidates to support them, not to mention the local dog catchers who will become the Obamas of 2038. There are groups like MoveOn, and big campaigns like Sanders’s can redistribute their spare resources, but it’s not quite the same as having a single, trusted national organisation that can use resources strategically.
Even if every progressive voter spent 5 hours a week supporting good local candidates, there would be obscure races in blue districts where that wasn’t enough.
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So, like Obama’s failure to roll back Bush’s various expansions of presidential power over war and the economy? (Hell, that’s not even fair to Bush, congress’s abdication of their powers starts in the 40s and Bush was a piker compared to Reagan.)
But anyway, yeah, there’s this problem with how humans say they’ll rearrange the balance of power but first we have to help them achieve the most over powered role, and then surprise surprise Lord Acton pops out of the woodwork waggling his beard and lecturing us that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
We need somebody like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, only with less contempt for the plebs. And the two-party system needs to die.
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This is what will spell the end of the DNC establishment:
But they have to get out and vote in 2018. That means making them aware of how the neoliberal consensus (including the Third-Way lite variety) has screwed their futures over.
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Fuck them, then. Is the DNC even necessary in this day and age?
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The DNC is getting what it deserves. If they would all quit and turn over the Party HQ to Sander’s and all, then they would have my support. Till then, they are the same old same old centrist blue republicans we’ve come to know.
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Are you sure that there isn’t a little bit of DLC/DNC conflation going on here?
